Studio Director by day.Entrepreneur by night.

―

Hayden Bleasel is an art director and entrepreneur currently living in Sydney, Australia. He has previously worked as a product designer, full-stack developer and data scientist for some of the most innovative tech companies in Australia and Silicon Valley.

In just a few years of work, he's designed a big data analysis platform for the U.S. Department of Justice, helped Sydney-based startups raise a total of $90m in VC funding (some of which went through famous accelerators like Y Combinator), started a startup which was featured in the UTS Newsroom and Startup Daily, and single-handedly rebranded the fastest growing FinTech startup in Australia.

―

He is currently Director of Lightsaber — a high-end creative studio for future makers. Lightsaber works on bold, new products for innovative companies, specialising in the key skills a startup needs help with to get from zero to one. Lightsaber work with a team of creatives you wouldn’t normally get access to, from companies such as Palantir, Spaceship, Tyro, Atlassian, Fox, Freelancer, Flirtey and National Geographic.

Michael Imstepf

digital innovation, Artesian

Hayden represents the next wave of designers and tech entrepreneurs. I was always in awe of his extraordinary cognitive ability... the speed at which he can process complexity on the fly and his talent for pulling together disparate bits of information.

Hayden is well-versed in many programming languages and has sound knowledge of visual and user experience design, a set of expertise for which he is well respected by engineers, designers and managers alike.

Hayden also impresses with his entrepreneurial mindset and how he combines design, technology and an entrepreneurial mindset to make great things happen.

Any company wanting to innovate would be lucky to have Hayden on board.

―

Hayden is also currently the Organiser of Sydney Designers — a local meetup community for digital designers sponsored by the biggest tech companies in Sydney. They host meetups every month, bringing hundreds of designers together to chat, network and learn from our influential guest speakers. They also maintain a newsbot that sends the best design content weekly straight to your inbox.

1300+

Meetup members

6

Past meetups

11

Upcoming meetups

―

For most of 2017, Hayden was working as Head of Product & Design at Spaceship — a new type of superannuation fund that lets you invest your super in the future. He brought the company to market with the first version of the super portal, helping us grow from $0 in FUM to $100m and raising $20m from investors like Sequoia Capital, Valar, Horizons Ventures, Mike Cannon-Brookes' Grok Ventures and Hong Kong billionaire Li-Ka Shing.

After that, he assisted in managing a team of 10 cross-functional developers, single-handedly rebranded the company from ground up, designed countless new financial products, built a drop-in analytics system and wired up the company's initial data pipelines.

Dan Siepen

Co-Founder, Coder Academy

Hayden is a rare individual. In all honesty, a simple recommendation for Hayden wouldn’t justify the skill, passion and creativity that Hayden offers to this industry.

Hayden is an outstanding professional. His portfolio and past experience speak for itself, but it is his commitment to something he wants to achieve for not only himself but his design and startup community, family & friends that makes it highly rewarding to witness.

He is a product design whizz. He's one of the best Javascript developers and front-end designers I know. It's very rare to have someone truly talented at both at a young age. I don't tell him this enough but I do look up to him for inspiration when it comes to building a new product. His standard is phenomenal. I certainly consider him one of the elite product makers in the world.

He has done incredible work and has personally helped mentor me in design processes & best practices. He continues to dissect complex design and product problems, and identifies unique opportunities for business problems and turns them into simply incredible products.

I do hope Hayden and I will work on a product together one day in the not too distant future. A great friend, loyal, charismatic and hard-working individual who you will certainly hear more of his name in the future!

―

Hayden is also working on side projects like Typelore — a platform that helps UX designers, researchers and product designers write and share amazing, collaborative case studies. It's still pre-release right now, but you can get early access to the product by joining the waitlist.